Yor Starship Design Illustrated

Yor Starship Design Illustrated

Meet the Yor, though the sociopathic murderbots don’t much care to meet with meat.

Our sentient race of homicidal machines are sitting pretty in the Galactic Civilizations III timeframe. The clever Drengin plot to hold back during the Dread Lord war and crush their enemies’ exhausted militaries afterward appealed to the Yor’s calculated self-interest. The robotic Yor fleets joined the Drengin in smashing the Terran and Arcean empires and their allies, and now hold joint military supremacy over the galaxy.

As lead designer Paul Boyer describes the Yor:

The Yor don’t get enough credit for their menace. They are perhaps the greatest known threat to the galaxy. Other races tend to think of the Drengin when they think of evil, but the Yor can make them look like look downright friendly.

The Yor are often mischaracterized as reasonable because they have such a long-term outlook. They will work with other races, and almost seem like friends, because the Yor know they will simply outlast them. And when their “friends” are no longer useful, they have no qualms with wiping them out utterly.

Their aggressive, psychopathic nature is reflected in their starships. The triangular theme denotes the sheer menace of the builders, leaving one with the feeling that just bumping into a Yor ship could easily leave one with no skin.

As a race that is constantly upgrading and refining not only their ships but themselves, the Yor design in a very modular fashion. This lets them quickly upgrade them if needed, or scrap them and use the separate components elsewhere.

Yor ships are also somewhat unique in the galaxy as they have very few crew. Often, a lone pilot is the only Yor aboard and serves as a brain for the huge and deadly vessel.

(click the image for a high-res downloadable version)

Yor ships, as you can see, reflect their primary motivation: the cleansing of unclean meatsacks. The Yor hold organic life in the greatest contempt, and the efficient removal of it from the galaxy is their highest calling. As one of our talented artists, Akil Dawkins, puts it:

The Yor are a race of aggressive sociopathic machines. So we went with a triangular theme for these ships as opposed to the square or circular theme, because triangular shapes connote aggression. Because the Yor are constantly upgrading themselves, we wanted to show some of their tech in between the large triangular shapes.

The circular lights at the front of the ships are reminiscent of the three-eye design of their leaders and drones. The centered eye was inspired by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was also an unfeeling sentient machine. The violet color scheme is similar to the Yor color scheme from Galactic Civilizations II, but de-saturated to reflect their cold and calculating nature.

The completed ships you see blocked out in this image are just two of the limitless possibilities our ship designer enables. The candy-colored images on the bottom let you see all the individual parts that make up that sleek battlecruiser. Players have full control over their ship designs in Galactic Civilizations III, so you can snap these pieces together however you like – but the designer helps you out with easy tools to do things like automate symmetry.

Our goal is to keep a unified design aesthetic for each race so that Yor ships still look like Yor ships even after players get a hold of the ship designer. We’re pretty happy with how the Yor fleet is turning out – but as always, please tell us what you think in the comments.

The ships for some civilizations always looked a bit weird to me. Especially the Yor. I suppose I can see the triangle-ness now in the core ship designs in GalCiv 2, but that was not what I would describe it. I would describe them as being wire looking and fragile looking. They seemed to have a wire (or some similar effect) going one way, then with most of the other parts go 90% another way. They also seemed to lack a "core". The area where the center of mass should be was empty space. Consequentially, I kept feeling they looked fragile, so my ships for the Yor looked much differently.

As such, most ships I made for them wound up looking different one way or another. Probably because I didn't' quite get their design philosophy.

Edit: While I'm thinking about it, could you post the design philosophy for the ships other civilizations? There were other ship styles I also didn't quite get as well.

So am I right in thinking that instead of the hull and extras system there is a module system? I have probably described that horribly but you get my point

There will still be "Hulls", they are needed as the primary stat holder, capacity, hit points, etc. The big difference is the hulls will be built using components, we will include many base hulls per race, but ship design aficionados will actually be able to create there own.

More details on the ship designer will be coming soon, its going to be crazy.

Will the designer work like that in GalCivII in which you could access other civilizations' pieces? If that is the case, would be possible (as an option if needed) to have access to other civilizations' hull models too? I suppose that you will allow us to create our own custom civilizations (correct me if I'm wrong) and I always missed to be able to mix hulls (not needing mods for that would be sweet).

Cannot wait to see more about the other civilizations and their styles.

Hope the ship design is not like Kerbal. At least now, it doesn't work for me. I like the GalCivII way and if that is refined and made easier to handle modules that's great. Automatic symmetry is great too.

Also.... lots of snap points! Snap point, snap points, snap points! That's what makes it so customisable and that's what gives the ship making so much variety.

From a pure lore standpoint, the Yor are my favorite race, so i'm glad to see this insight into them and their ships. I have always imagine the Yor to be a GC2 version of the Klikiss Robots (Kevin J Anderson fans know what im saying here).

You can use Template ship designs and skip straight to Equip mode, where all components are functional. There will also be a Design mode, where you can design ships based on existing hulls, or even build them from scratch.

We Very much want to make sure players do not feel overwhelmed by the ship designer, or feel they have to custom design every ship they use.

That said, for those of you who want go crazy, will be able to do amazing things.

I like the look and the fact that the "snap points" are staying in GC3. Being able to get assistance for making the design symmetrical (when I want it to be symmetrical) will be a big help. It is a pain in GC2 to do symmetry on some of the larger designs.

Issues I have with the designer in GC2:

- If you have a piece that you like, it was not (or at least not obvious) how to grab that piece that is already placed and copy/paste it to other locations on the same hull. Instead, I had to consult my memory and go searching through the list of parts, trying to remember where I pulled the original piece from. So being able to select a piece that is already placed and then copy it to use to place new pieces would be a handy feature. Nor was there any way to select a piece on a ship already designed and tag it as a favorite, you had to go hunt the piece down in the left-hand parts list.

- While the "favorites" tag was nice in GC2, it would be nicer if we could tag the modules/bits/extras with multiple tags (user-defined labels) that get saved across games automatically (stored in our user profile). So I might tag a particular design item as "engines" or "wings" or "big" or under multiple user-defined categories. Just like the existing "favorites" tag, it lets me find the pieces that I like faster. But if I marked too many as "favorite" I ended up with the same problem that I had before of having to look through a long list of thumbnails.

- For items that we tag with "favorite" or "engines" or "wings" or "wtfbbq", we need to be able to sort / filter those items based on the "pack" (or theme) that they came from.

- There should probably be an automatically assigned tag called "used in current game" for modules / decorations. That gives you a quick reference of "these are the parts that you've used before, but you forgot to make them favorites".

- The GC2 ship designer lacked feedback on how "big" the craft that you were designing was. You couldn't tell total length/width/girth until you went and looked at an intelligence report elsewhere. So you might be trying to design a "small" fighter (say 50m long), but bolt on so many pieces and scale them in a way that you end up with a 200m monstrosity that doesn't fit aesthetically with the rest of your ships.

- A way to scale the final design up/down to fit your (self-defined) target dimensions, without having to resize each individual piece.

- The thumbnails in GC2 were small, with no way to preview a particular piece (and rotate/zoom it) without moving it onto the ship design canvas and having to rotate/zoom the entire canvas to get a better look at the piece before using it.

Things I really liked in the GC2 designer:

- The ability to obsolete designs to remove clutter from the list of ships that I was allowed to select from when picking a new ship to build on a particular planet.

- The ability to place anything anywhere.

- The snap-it nature and easy rotation of 30/45/90 degrees depending on how much finesse I wanted. It was like building with lego blocks and worked very well (most of the time). It made it easy to get something that looked nice, without much work.

- It was easy to reset the camera when I got it into strange contortions and zoomed the ship off the screen. Overall, I think the camera controls in the ship canvas were pretty good.

- Ship types were divided into "core" and "user". In addition I would have liked to be able to also filter by hull size.